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enFull-body Tastehttps://student.societyforscience.org/article/full-body-taste?mode=topic&context=79
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<h2>Turns out that the tongue isn’t the only place where the body can taste what you ate</h2>
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<div class="views-field views-field-title"> <span class="views-label views-label-title">by</span> <span class="field-content"><a href="/author/douglas-fox?mode=topic&amp;context=79">Douglas Fox</a></span> </div>
<div class="views-field views-field-published-at"> <span class="field-content">10:05pm, March 23, 2011</span> </div> </div>
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<p></p><p><img class="caption" title="Small tastersPictured are three taste buds on the tongue of a mouse. Each one is half as wide as a grain of salt. Taste cells, which appear here as red and green, bunch together to form the taste buds. The red cells taste sour things. It’s not clear yet what the green cells taste. Courtesy of Thomas Finger" src="/sites/student.societyforscience.org/files/main/articles/Small_tasters-300x204.jpg" alt="Small tastersPictured are three taste buds on the tongue of a mouse. Each one is half as wide as a grain of salt. Taste cells, which appear here as red and green, bunch together to form the taste buds. The red cells taste sour things. It’s not clear yet what the green cells taste. Courtesy of Thomas Finger" width="300" height="204" style="float : right;" /></p>
<p>It was an exciting day when Thomas Finger looked inside the nose of a small black mouse. Finger had borrowed the animal from another scientist. It was not your average mouse.
</p><p>The mouse's genes had been changed so that the taste buds on its tongue turned green when you shined light on them — like a secret message written in secret ink.
</p><p>But no one had ever looked inside its nose. When Finger finally did look there with a microscope, he saw thousands of green cells dotting the soft pink lining. “It was like looking at little green stars at night,” says Finger, who is a neurobiologist at the Rocky Mountain Taste and Smell Center at the University of Colorado in Denver. (A neurobiologist studies how the nervous system develops and functions.)
</p><p>Seeing that green starry sky was Finger's first glimpse of a new world. If he and other scientists are right, we don't taste things just on our tongues. Other parts of our body can also taste things — our nose, our stomach, even our lungs!
</p><p>You might think of taste as something that you experience when you put chocolate in your mouth — or chicken soup, or salt. But for you to taste chocolate or chicken soup, special cells on your tongue have to tell the brain that they detected chemicals that are in the food. We have at least five kinds of these chemical-detecting cells (commonly called taste cells) on our tongues: cells that detect salt, sweet compounds, sour things, bitter things and savory things like meat or broth.
</p><p>You might call these five things the primary colors of your mouth. The unique taste of every food is made up of some combination of salt, sweet, sour, bitter or savory, just as you can make any color of paint by mixing together bits of red, yellow and blue.
</p><p>It's these chemical-sensing cells that scientists are now finding all over the body.
</p><p>“I'll bet you that in terms of total number of cells,” says Finger, “there are more [taste cells] outside the mouth than inside the mouth.”
</p><p>This gives us clues about other functions the sense of taste has in our bodies. It could also help scientists find new treatments for certain diseases.
</p><p><strong>Fish skin: more than a feeling</strong>
</p><p>It's an exciting time for scientists who study taste. Finger spent 30 years working toward this big moment. Some of the first clues came from fish.
</p><p>Back in the 1960s, scientists looking at fish skin under microscopes discovered that the outside of a fish’s slippery body is dotted with thousands of funny cells shaped like bowling pins. Those funny cells look just like the chemical-detecting cells on your tongue. At the time, no one was sure what those bowling-pin cells on fish skin did. But years later, scientists found that they actually can taste. When food chemicals were sprinkled onto the fish skin, those cells sent a message to the fish brain — just like the cells on your tongue tell your brain when you taste food.
</p><p></p><p><img class="caption" title="Nosey tastersTaste cells on the inside of the nose of a genetically engineered mouse appear green under the microscope. Those taste cells talk to the treelike branches of nerve cells, which are red in this picture. Credit: Thomas Finger" src="/sites/student.societyforscience.org/files/main/articles/Nosey_tasters-300x300.jpg" alt="Nosey tastersTaste cells on the inside of the nose of a genetically engineered mouse appear green under the microscope. Those taste cells talk to the treelike branches of nerve cells, which are red in this picture. Credit: Thomas Finger" width="300" height="300" style="float : left;" /></p>
<p>For fish, being able to taste things all over their body comes in handy. Some fish called searobins use this to find their next meal. When searobins poke their pointy fins into the mud on the seafloor, they can “taste” the worms they're looking to eat. Other fish called rocklings use these cells to sense the presence of larger fish that might want to eat them.
</p><p>In these cases, the buried worms and big fish leak small amounts of chemicals into the water and mud. Taste cells on the skin of searobins and rocklings detect the chemicals (sort of the way you might be able to taste what’s in the bathwater after your filthy little brother sat in the tub for a while).
</p><p>As Finger studied searobins, goldfish and other wet critters, he began to wonder whether land animals like cats, mice and people could also sense taste outside of their tongues. “Why wouldn't it be a good idea?” he asks. “The more information you get from your environment, the better off you are.”
</p><p><strong>Peeling mud</strong>
</p><p>But finding taste cells on land animals wasn't easy. Unlike fishes', their skin is covered in a dry crust of dead cells, like the layer of cracked mud that forms as a water puddle dries. A taste cell hidden under that crust wouldn’t function. It needs to come into contact with chemicals in the outside world in order to detect them. So Finger decided to look at the wetter, fishier parts of our body. He started his search deep inside the nose.
</p><p>That's when he borrowed the mouse with the green taste buds — and found those green, bowling pin-shaped cells inside its nose. The cells were scattered instead of being clumped together, as they are in the tongue. But one thing was for sure: Those cells could taste.
</p><p>When Finger tested them, the cells contained the same special proteins, called receptors, that your tongue uses to detect chemicals in food. Different kinds of receptors detect different kinds of chemicals — like sugars, sour things and so on. Those in the mouse’s nose specialized in detecting bitter chemicals.
</p><p>Since Finger's discovery of this in 2003, other scientists have found bitter-sensing taste cells inside the hundreds of branching tunnels that move air through the lungs of animals.
</p><p>Some scientists have also found taste cells along the path that food travels through a person’s body — a journey of at least 12 hours. From the stomach, where food is first digested, those taste cells can be found all of the way to the large intestine at the lower end. Some in your gut taste bitter things, others scout for sweet sugars.
</p><p><strong>(Not) tasting your poop</strong>
</p><p>“There is an enormous number of these cells in the lower gut,” notes Enrique Rozengurt, a biologist at UCLA (the University of California campus in Los Angeles) whose team first found taste cells in the gut in 2002. “Why do you have all of these receptors?” asks Rozengurt. “There are some very profound possibilities.”
</p><p>It might seem like a really bad idea to have taste cells beyond the tongue. In your nose, wouldn't you taste salty buggers? And wouldn't you also taste the brown gooey stuff in your large intestine — which is pretty much just poop waiting to be excreted? If we have taste cells inside our body, shouldn't we be tasting nasty stuff all day long?
</p><p>No, says Finger. What you experience when your body “tastes” something depends on what part of your brain the taste cells are talking to.
</p><p>When you put a bitter pill in your mouth, the cells on your tongue talk to a part of your brain called the insular cortex. This part of your brain is part of your moment-to-moment thoughts. It gets the message from your tongue — <em>bitter!</em> And <em>yuck!</em> Immediately, your face scrunches up. You want to spit the pill out.
</p><p><strong>Your inner worm</strong>
</p><p>But when cells in the gut detect something bitter, they send a little telegram to a deeper, older part of the brain. Scientists call it the nucleus of the solitary tract, but you might well think of it as your inner worm.
</p><p>This part of the brain takes care of simple things that a mindless worm would do: pushing food through the gut, digesting it and pooping it out. You don't have to think about those things. They just happen.
</p><p></p><p><img class="caption" title="Fin tastersThis mud-dwelling fish, called a searobin, has taste cells on its pointy front fins. It sticks those fins into the mud in order to feel around — or you might say, taste around — for worms that it wants to eat. Credit: Thomas Finger" src="/sites/student.societyforscience.org/files/main/articles/Fin_tasters-300x97.jpg" alt="Fin tastersThis mud-dwelling fish, called a searobin, has taste cells on its pointy front fins. It sticks those fins into the mud in order to feel around — or you might say, taste around — for worms that it wants to eat. Credit: Thomas Finger" width="300" height="97" style="float : right;" /></p>
<p>When your brain's inner worm senses the arrival of something bitter in the intestines, it tells your brain: Stop. You've eaten something bad. Get rid of it — quickly! You may suddenly feel sick, throw up, or have diarrhea. And these things happen without any conscious decisionmaking on your part.
</p><p>The world is full of bad things like poisonous plants and spoiled foods. These are things that bitter-taste cells in your digestive system scout for. Says Rozengurt, they “are there to defend us against all of these harmful substances.”
</p><p><strong>Bitter sneeze</strong>
</p><p>Bitter-detection cells in your nose and lungs protect you in kind of the same way. Bad bacteria sometimes enter your nose or lungs.They cause infections that can make it hard to breathe. Bitter-taste cells sound an internal alarm when they detect chemicals that the bad bacteria squirt out.
</p><p>That alarm signals your body to sneeze or cough the bad stuff out. Bitter-taste cells can also trigger a process that tells white blood cells to attack the unwelcome germs.
</p><p>It makes sense that you'd want to get rid of nasty, bitter-tasting stuff. But your stomach and intestines also have cells that detect sweet sugars. And they send out very different messages.
</p><p>It's one thing to taste sugary pancakes and syrup in your mouth, but what about along the rest of the 30 feet that your breakfast travels through the stomach and intestines?
</p><p>Those other parts of your body also need to know when something sweet has arrived, says Robert Margolskee of the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City. Cells scattered up and down your gut act as a tracking system to let your body know when the sugary food arrives at each location. “It starts things going further down in the digestive tract to digest those things,” says Margolskee.
</p><p>Scientists have some evidence that the gut also contains taste cells that detect meaty, savory chemicals. Like the sweet-taste cells, these probably also alert different parts of the gut to what's coming.
</p><p><strong>Taste medicines</strong>
</p><p>Margolskee lent Finger those green-tongued mice in 2001. In 2009, Margolskee discovered that sugar-detecting cells of the intestine squirt out a messenger substance, called a hormone, that prepares the intestine to soak up sugars. Those hormones also let another part of the body, called the pancreas, know that sugar is on its way. The pancreas oozes out its own hormone — called insulin — that tells other parts of the body, from the muscles to the brain, to prepare for that sugar.
</p><p>Making drugs that affect the gut's taste cells could help treat a common disease called diabetes. In diabetes, the rest of the body appears almost deaf to the insulin message that the pancreas sends out. So the muscles and brain don't take in much of the sugar, a major source of energy, from the blood. A drug that “turns up the sound in these gut taste cells,” says Margolskee, might help the gut and the pancreas more effectively shout out to the rest of the body that sugar is coming — and to get ready.
</p><p>Some people have another problem called irritable bowel syndrome. Here, food oozes through their intestines too quickly or too slowly, causing painful traffic jams. Drugs that tickle the bitter-detecting cells might help the intestine push food through more quickly and smoothly, reducing belly aches.
</p><p>Just this past November, scientists made a more surprising discovery: Bitter-tasting cells in the lungs might one day help doctors treat a disease called asthma.
</p><p>People with asthma have trouble breathing because the airways in their lungs close up. Now scientists have found that some bitter substances actually open those airways. And these substances do it better than one medicine that doctors frequently use to treat asthma.
</p><p>It's was only the latest surprise. People who study taste outside the mouth expect more will keep on coming.
</p><p>Until recently, says Rozengurt, a universe of taste sensors existed “that we were vaguely aware of, but we didn't have any clues of how to study. Now we do.”
</p><p><strong>POWER WORDS</strong>
</p><p><strong>asthma</strong> A disease characterized by a difficulty in breathing, and by wheezing, coughing and constricted airways.
</p><p><strong>gut</strong> The intestine.
</p><p><strong>hormone</strong> A molecule the body produces to serve as a messenger to help the body in its basic functions.
</p><p><strong>insulin</strong> A protein hormone that helps the body get energy from fats and carbohydrates.
</p><p><strong>pancreas </strong>A gland behind the stomach that serves several functions, including releasing molecules that help with digestion and releasing insulin.
</p><p><strong>taste bud</strong> Small organs on the tongue that help mediate taste.</p></div></div></div><span property="rnews:name schema:name" content="Full-body Taste" class="rdf-meta element-hidden"></span>Thu, 24 Mar 2011 02:05:10 +0000ac1365 at https://student.societyforscience.orgLife trapped under a glacierhttps://student.societyforscience.org/article/life-trapped-under-glacier?mode=topic&context=79
<div class="field field-name-field-op-section-term field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/topic/life?mode=topic&amp;context=79" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Life</a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-sn-subtitle">
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<h2>At Antarctica&amp;#8217;s Blood Falls, scientists study microbes living in a dark and salty home</h2>
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<div class="views-field views-field-title"> <span class="views-label views-label-title">by</span> <span class="field-content"><a href="/author/stephen-ornes?mode=topic&amp;context=79">Stephen Ornes</a></span> </div>
<div class="views-field views-field-published-at"> <span class="field-content">12:00am, April 29, 2009</span> </div> </div>
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<table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="1" align="center"><tbody><tr><td><img src="/sites/student.societyforscience.org/files/main/articles/a1859_1119.jpg" border="0" alt="Iron in water seeping from an underground ecosystem takes on a rusty color as it is exposed to air. Surprisingly hearty life forms use iron and sulfates, instead of oxygen, to live in their long-isolated, dark and salty home." /></td></tr><tr><td><p><em>Iron in water seeping from an underground ecosystem takes on a rusty color as it is exposed to air. Surprisingly hearty life forms use iron and sulfates, instead of oxygen, to live in their long-isolated, dark and salty home.</em></p></td></tr><tr><td><strong><!--more-->B. Urmston</strong></td></tr></tbody></table><p>Ever heard of Blood Falls? It’s freezing cold, far away and hard to reach — probably not where you’re headed on your family vacation this summer.</p><p>Blood Falls is at the tip of a giant glacier in Antarctica. As its name suggests, the icy face of Blood Falls is red — but not from blood. Instead the water gets its hue because it’s rich in iron. When the water trickles out from its underground beginnings, the iron is exposed to oxygen in the air and quickly forms the red rust.</p><p>It may not be a tourist hot spot, but Blood Falls is very interesting to scientists who study living creatures. A geomicrobiologist — someone who studies how tiny organisms affect or use minerals — recently studied the rusty water and came up with some surprising results.</p><p>The water that feeds Blood Falls probably comes from a salty underground lake. It’s home to microbes that surprisingly don’t need oxygen to survive. Microbes are tiny organisms, usually invisible to the naked eye. The microbes found in Blood Falls are similar to other microbes that live in the ocean. </p><p> “This briny pond is a unique sort of time capsule,” says Jill Mikucki, the Dartmouth University geomicrobiologist who led the study of the water seeping from Blood Falls. “I don’t know of any other environment quite like this on earth.”</p><p>When she and her team studied the water, they found no oxygen but lots of dissolved iron. They suspect that the underwater reservoir formed when a giant glacier, now 1,300 feet thick, moved over the salty lake at least 1.5 million years ago. This trapped the water and everything in it in an oxygen-free, or anoxic, environment. </p><p>Unlike human beings and most other forms of life, the microbes from Blood Falls don’t need oxygen to live. Instead, they are able to exist using the iron and sulfates, chemical salts also found in the water. The microbes transfer particles called electrons from the sulfates to the iron. </p><p>The microbes at Blood Falls show that life can exist in even the harshest environments. In addition to giving us more information about our own planet, the study of these “extremophiles” may be useful in other scientific areas — like the search for life on other planets! If scientists find organisms on Earth that live on sulfur and iron, instead of oxygen, researchers might gain a better idea of where to look for life elsewhere in the universe.</p><hr /><p><strong>Power words:</strong> (Yahoo! Kids Dictionary and WordNet)</p><p><strong>microbe</strong>: A tiny life form; a microorganism, especially a bacterium that causes disease. </p><p><strong>iron: </strong>A silvery-white, magnetic, metallic element occurring abundantly in combined forms. Used in a wide range of important structural materials.<strong></strong></p><p><strong>sulfate: </strong>A chemical compound made from sulfur. </p><p><strong>anoxic: </strong>A severe lack of oxygen<strong></strong></p><p><b>Going Deeper: </b></p></div></div></div><span property="rnews:name schema:name" content="Life trapped under a glacier" class="rdf-meta element-hidden"></span>Wed, 29 Apr 2009 04:00:00 +0000email162 at https://student.societyforscience.orgA 'book' on every living thinghttps://student.societyforscience.org/article/book-every-living-thing?mode=topic&context=79
<div class="field field-name-field-op-section-term field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/search?mode=topic&amp;context=79&amp;tt=17" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Animals</a>,</div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/search?mode=topic&amp;context=79&amp;tt=1" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Plants</a>,</div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/topic/life?mode=topic&amp;context=79" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Life</a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-sn-subtitle">
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<h2>The biggest encyclopedia ever, with an entry for every living species, is available now at a computer near you.</h2>
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<div class="views-field views-field-title"> <span class="views-label views-label-title">by</span> <span class="field-content"><a href="/author/susan-milius?mode=topic&amp;context=79">Susan Milius</a></span> </div>
<div class="views-field views-field-published-at"> <span class="field-content">12:00am, March 5, 2008</span> </div> </div>
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<p>Fish that weigh more than a refrigerator. Fish with glowing slime. Fish that look like cows—or at least did to the folks who named them cowfish (and these creatures <em>do</em> have long faces).
</p><p>Some very odd creatures swim through the world's waters. Now, getting to know them is about to get easier. Beginning last week, a new Web site went live. Called the Encyclopedia of Life (<a href="http://www.eol.org/home.html" target="_blank">www.eol.org</a>), this online book of life will offer basic facts on about 30,000 species—or kinds—of fish. That's every type known.
</p><p>This tally includes the first six species named in 2008: all damselfish from what are sometimes called Twilight Zone coral reefs in the Pacific Ocean. The fish are not well-known because they dwell deeper beneath the surface of the sea than standard SCUBA gear lets divers go. Scientists published the first formal descriptions of the six new species on New Year's Day.
</p><table width="1" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" align="center"><tbody><tr><td><img src="/sites/student.societyforscience.org/files/main/articles/a1684_129.jpg" alt="BLUE FISH. An artist who works with scientists made this image of the deep-blue chromis, a damselfish from the Pacific. It's one of the first fish named in 2008; its official description was published Jan. 1." border="0" /></td>
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<p><em>BLUE FISH. An artist who works with scientists made this image of the deep-blue chromis, a damselfish from the Pacific. It's one of the first fish named in 2008; its official description was published Jan. 1.</em></p>
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</tr></tbody></table><p>But as impressive as 30,000 fish sounds, it's barely a baby step for the Web site. Its developers dream of making it the largest biological encyclopedia ever, with a Web page for every living species.
</p><p>True, there are already a lot of Web sites about living things, and a lot of encyclopedias too. But they're not the best tools for working biologists, say the encyclopedia's designers. Scientists need sites with information that has been double-checked by other scientists. An ideal site would include links to all the basic research, from genetics to detailed pictures of museum specimens. The dream site would automatically update itself as new research is published. Finally, even people who aren't scientists should be able to use such a site to identify what's living in their backyards—or anywhere else in the world.
</p><p>Think of it as one humongous book that can keep growing in size—to millions of pages. If those pages were made of paper, the book would become unwieldy and heavy and hard to update. However, because it's available online—and only online—anyone and everyone with access to a computer can browse its virtual pages effortlessly. Moreover, those new pages can be added quickly—indeed, the same day new information becomes available.
</p><p><strong>One wish</strong>
</p><p>The dream for a better encyclopedia comes from biologist Edward O. Wilson of Harvard University. In 2007, he was invited to that year's TED conference, a meeting of leaders in technology, education, and design. Each year at this meeting, several participants get a chance to make a wish in front of the crowd and explain why that wish deserves everybody's help. In 2007, Wilson wished for an encyclopedia of life.
</p><p>For starters, it could speed the process of naming species, he argued. This naming process is something that few people understand. For more than 250 years, scientists have been naming species, using the same basic rules (two names, in Latin). So there's a widespread belief that by now just about everything already has a name, Wilson says.
</p><p>But that's not true. Although biologists have assigned formal names to about 1.8 million species, new ones are being discovered all the time. Wilson estimates that among plants alone, 2,000 new species are named every year. That's more than five a day. Nobody knows how many more species await discovery, but some biologists suspect another 8.2 million species remain unnamed.
</p><table width="1" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" align="center"><tbody><tr><td><img src="/sites/student.societyforscience.org/files/main/articles/a1684_2163.jpg" alt="FIRST FLOWERS. The first plants in the encyclopedia will be members of the potato family. It's full of celebrity cousins, such as the tomato and tobacco. The family has plenty of members that don't grow in gardens, such as this &lt;span class=normal&gt;Solanum " border="0" /></td>
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<p><em>FIRST FLOWERS. The first plants in the encyclopedia will be members of the potato family. It's full of celebrity cousins, such as the tomato and tobacco. The family has plenty of members that don't grow in gardens, such as this <span>Solanum </span></em></p>
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</tr><tr><td><strong><!--more-->M. Nee/NY Botanical Garden</strong></td>
</tr></tbody></table><p>And scientists probably haven't even discovered all the really important species. For example, biologists have been studying life in the sea for hundreds of years. Yet within the lifetimes of today's college seniors, biologists finally described a group of microscopic bacteria called <em>Prochlorococcus</em>. Great masses of them float in the oceans performing important work, harvesting energy from sunlight that will later help fuel the microbes' predators.
</p><p>Describing an organism is just the first step in understanding it. Yet that first step isn't easy. To figure out whether a funny-looking fish or plant, or speck of marine life, really is a new species can take a great deal of research, says Wilson. A scientist has to look at creatures like it, or at really good pictures of them. Those specimens could be in museums anywhere in the world. The describer also has to read about related species. Some of these descriptions appear in fragile old books, available in only a few libraries. A good Web encyclopedia though would help a scientist find all these things in one convenient place, Wilson argued. And it would save scientists a lot of travel time—and expense.
</p><p><strong>Turning pages</strong>
</p><p>The oldest books that a scientist might want online were published long before anyone had a clue what electricity was, much less how to build a 21st-century computer. So several libraries around the world are electronically scanning rare, fragile old books and then posting digital images of them, page by page, online. When the Encyclopedia of Life gets going, people will be able to click on the page for a species and from that, get a look at the book page of the oldest description. Some of the books being scanned are several hundred years old with yellowing pages and a weird spot or two. The project already has some books online (See <a href="http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/" target="_blank">www.biodiversitylibrary.org/</a>).
</p><p>Thomas Garnett of the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., heads the scanning team. During a recent visit, he led this visitor into the museum's basement to see the project in action. (The museum is old and has huge collections of just about everything, but the basement hallways are wide and well lit. Alas, no piles of dinosaur bones spill out of closets.)
</p><p>The trip ends up in a large room with a computer desk pushed back against the wall. A framework above it supports a tent of black fabric that falls down around the desk. In the center of the desk, a small book with yellowed pages rests in a V-shaped cradle. The shape prevents elderly books from spraining their backs. A pair of cameras hangs from the frame, lined up just so. The workers photograph each pair of open pages at the same time, with a "ja-chick" sound and a flash of light. The black tent protects the setup and keeps those flashes from disrupting nearby workers. A person running one of these stations can copy about 3,000 pages each day.
</p><table width="1" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" align="center"><tbody><tr><td><img src="/sites/student.societyforscience.org/files/main/articles/a1684_3352.jpg" alt="SCAN THIS. A page from a botany book published in 1807 shows a &lt;span class=normal&gt;Calliandra grandiflora&lt;/span&gt;. The electronic-scanning team has copied this book page by page and posted it on the Web. Old biology books such as this one will eventually be" border="0" /></td>
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<p><em>SCAN THIS. A page from a botany book published in 1807 shows a <span>Calliandra grandiflora</span>. The electronic-scanning team has copied this book page by page and posted it on the Web. Old biology books such as this one will eventually be</em></p>
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</tr></tbody></table><p>For more modern content, the producers of the encyclopedia are turning to scientists who have already created databases with accurate, up-to-date, computerized information. The fish pages—among the first to debut in the encyclopedia—will come from a project called FishBase, headquartered in the Philippines. It won't have all the fancy links planned for the final version of the pages. For instance, the site may not yet have details about the mucus products of the shining tubeshoulder fish, but it should give pictures of honeycomb cowfish. It will also provide the weight of an adult northern blue-fin tuna—these can tip the scales at about 1,500 pounds (680 kg), which is around the combined weight of four kitchen refrigerators.
</p><p>Next will come pages of plants in the nightshade family, put together by botanists around the world. This varied group of plants includes tomatoes, tobacco, and potatoes as well as their wild relatives. It's a fine way to celebrate the International Year of the Potato. (Not a joke. See <a href="http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20071222/food.asp" target="_blank"><strong>"It's Spud Time"</strong></a>.)
</p><p><strong>One for all</strong>
</p><p>As much as scientists may look forward to using the new encyclopedia, it isn't just for them, says Mark Westneat of the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. "The other audience we're targeting is middle schoolers," says Westneat. "They're very quick. They're interested. They're also capable of handling complex ideas." Plus, they're agile Web surfers.
</p><p>And soon, possibly within a year, these students may be able to help construct the encyclopedia. Everybody's going to get a chance. The project's executive director, James Edwards, also based at the Smithsonian, says he's already working on ways for nonscientists to contribute. The plan is evolving, he says, but he imagines a system where anyone can submit a photograph or information. Once a scientist verifies a species' identification and information, that image will receive some mark of approval. The best images will be added to the encyclopedia.
</p><p>So practice taking clear pictures. With perhaps 10 million species on Earth, the encyclopedia is going to need a lot of photographers.
</p><hr /><p><strong>Going Deeper: </strong>
</p><p><a href="/node/2102">Additional Information</a>
</p><p><a href="/node/1509">Word Find: Living Encyclopedia</a></p>
</div></div></div><span property="rnews:name schema:name" content="A &#039;book&#039; on every living thing" class="rdf-meta element-hidden"></span>Wed, 05 Mar 2008 05:00:00 +0000x1326 at https://student.societyforscience.orgWhat Comets Are Made Ofhttps://student.societyforscience.org/article/what-comets-are-made?mode=topic&context=79
<div class="field field-name-field-op-section-term field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/topic/life?mode=topic&amp;context=79" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Life</a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-sn-subtitle">
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<h2>Astronomers are learning a lot from watching a comet break into pieces.</h2>
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<div class="views-field views-field-title"> <span class="views-label views-label-title">by</span> <span class="field-content"><a href="/author/emily-sohn?mode=topic&amp;context=79">Emily Sohn</a></span> </div>
<div class="views-field views-field-published-at"> <span class="field-content">12:00am, July 20, 2007</span> </div> </div>
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<p>Astronomers are watching a comet break into pieces, practically before their eyes. Their observations, reported by scientists at Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md., are giving surprising insight into the structure of these space objects.</p><p>Comets are fairly small (about 12 miles across or less) balls of ice, rock, and dust that make long, noncircular orbits around the sun. When a comet gets near the sun, the star's heat melts some of it, creating what looks like a tail. At this stage, it looks somewhat like a tadpole.</p><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="1" align="center"><tbody><tr><td><img src="/sites/student.societyforscience.org/files/main/articles/a1522_1932.3a.RC.fob.jpg" border="0" alt="When the comet 73P/Schwassmann-Wachmann 3 broke apart in June 2006, it produced at least 68 chunks, including this large piece, called Fragment B." /></td></tr><tr><td><p><em>When the comet 73P/Schwassmann-Wachmann 3 broke apart in June 2006, it produced at least 68 chunks, including this large piece, called Fragment B.</em></p></td></tr><tr><td><strong><!--more-->H. Weaver/JHUAPL, M. Mutchler and Z. Levay/STScI, NASA, ESA</strong></td></tr></tbody></table><p>Comets sometimes burst into pieces when the sun's heat turns their ice into water vapor. By studying these chunks, astronomers can compare the material at the center of a comet with material at its surface.</p><p>The scientists expected that a comet's center would look different from its surface. That's because comets probably formed at the same time as the solar system, so the material at the center has probably remained unchanged for just as long. The surface material, on the other hand, is changed by the sun's radiation.</p><p>For the new study, the Johns Hopkins team observed the breakup of a comet called 73P/Schwassmann-Wachmann 3 (SW3). The comet orbits the sun every 5.34 years.</p><p>In 1995, SW3 split into at least five chunks. In June 2006, it passed within a relatively close 11.7 million kilometers (7.3 million miles) of Earth. Around that time, it disintegrated even more. Scientists counted 68 fragments.</p><p>The two largest chunks are called B and C. Each is several hundred meters wide. The scientists studied both chunks using NASA's Infrared Telescope Facility and the Keck II telescope, both on Hawaii's Mauna Kea. The researchers found that B and C have nearly identical compositions, with the same proportions of substances such as water and carbon dioxide.</p><p>Those results suggest that comets have maintained more of their original form than scientists had expected. "We were really lucky" that the comet came close enough for astronomers to make observations soon after a breakup, says lead researcher Neil Dello Russo.</p><p>Because this was the first study of its kind, the scientists don't yet know whether all comets are the same, inside and out.—<em>Emily Sohn</em></p><p><b>Going Deeper: </b></p><p>Cowen, Ron. 2007. <a href="http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20070714/fob5.asp">Shattering find? Comet fragments show surprising uniformity.</a> <em>Science News</em> 172(July 14):21. Available at <a href="http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20070714/fob5.asp">http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20070714/fob5.asp</a> .</p><p>Sohn, Emily. 2006. <a href="/articles/20060510/Note3.asp">The way a comet crumbles.</a> <em>Science News for Kids</em> (May 10). Available at <a href="http://www.sciencenewsforkids.org/articles/20060510/Note3.asp">http://www.sciencenewsforkids.org/articles/20060510/Note3.asp</a> .</p><p>______. 2006. <a href="/articles/20060329/Note3.asp">Fiery dust from an icy comet.</a> <em>Science News for Kids</em> (March 29). Available at <a href="http://www.sciencenewsforkids.org/articles/20060329/Note3.asp">http://www.sciencenewsforkids.org/articles/20060329/Note3.asp</a> .</p>
</div></div></div><span property="rnews:name schema:name" content="What Comets Are Made Of" class="rdf-meta element-hidden"></span>Fri, 20 Jul 2007 04:00:00 +0000email1616 at https://student.societyforscience.org